Barbara Windsor in the recently restored Sparrows Can’t Sing
Mother of modern theatre Joan Littlewood’s only foray into film came in 1963 with Sparrows Can’t Sing. It was an adaptation of a play of almost the same name – simply replace ‘Sparrows’ with the Cockney translation, ‘Sparrers’ – penned by Stephen Lewis, who would later find TV fame with On the Buses and Last of the Summer Wine. Newly restored for Blue-ray and DVD, it is a masterpiece of early East End cinema and a gorgeous record of everyday life in post-war London.
Littlewood, whose theatre credits include a successful 1955 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, directed the play in 1960 at her renowned Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. Well received, Sparrers found its way to the West End in 1961, before the director took her talented cast into the streets of Stepney, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs to remake it for the screen.
The film stars James Booth, a year before his iconic turn as Private Henry Hook in Zulu, and a 26-year-old Barbara Windsor, whose sprightly performance garnered the only BAFTA nomination of her career to date. Roy Kinnear, Murray Melvin, Avis Bunnage, George Sewell, Lewis himself and the Kray Twins – who reportedly hung out on set – also feature, albeit a fleeting appearance by the notorious gangsters.
Booth is Charlie Gooding, a cheeky boozer with a penchant for playing the field. Sparrows begins with Charlie’s return from two years at sea and follows him as he marches home to reclaim the beautiful wife he left behind. He finds his old house in rubble on the ground and learns that Windsor’s character Maggie has relocated but is still about.
What he doesn’t know is that she and her young child are shacked up with a local bus driver, enjoying a rare spell of domestic bliss in one of the new high-rise tower blocks that have begun to pepper the skyline.
Charlie settles down in the Red Lion pub while news of his arrival spreads over town, and soon enough Maggie is on her way. Their re-acquaintance is fraught with complicated history, and as the husband works his charm on his estranged and resistant wife, an underlying control, even violence, unsettles the comedy – which is considerable throughout. Charlie’s chirpy, larger-than-life exterior is chipped away to expose a deeply flawed, real character within.
What follows is a disarmingly bleak, occasionally warm and always brilliant portrayal of a knotty romance. Littlewood prods at the absurdity of the decisions we make and at the same time immortalises a diversifying, fun-loving and morally-questionable community of a bygone era.
Rodrigo Felha’s Favela Gay, Genesis Cinema, 26 November
Queer film and arts festival Fringe! returns this month, with screenings, talks, panels, workshops, performances and parties taking place in 14 venues across East London from 24–29 November.
This year sees the festival branch out to the Barbican and Genesis Cinema, and there’s a distinctly international flavour to programme, with representation from more than 20 countries and a special focus on Brazil.
Documentary Favela Gay, directed by Rodrigo Felha, looks at queer life in the slums of Rio de Janeiro (26 November), while Gustavo Vinagre’s hybrid documentary Nova Dubai explores sex, urban spaces and gentrification (28 November).
Other highlights include Eisenstein in Guanajuato, Peter Greenway’s camp and provocative biopic of filmmaker Segei Eisenstein’s trip to Mexico in 1931 (24 November), the Lithuanian Oscar-nominated Summer of Sangaile, a coming-of-age story of two young girls (25 November), and the documentary The New Black, which follows activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Maryland, USA (27 November).
From its humble beginnings five years ago, Fringe! has blossomed into one of London’s premier queer arts festivals.
Organisers are promising a packed programme of thought-provoking new work from across the globe, and to complement the films expect a series of talks on issues such as LGBT immigration, workshops about spanking and shibari, and live performances from the likes of Portuguese ‘post-porn’ collective Quimera Rosa.
Showing at this year’s London Film Festival are two short works that present very different views of the East End. One is a brutally honest drama about the conflict between traditional Jewish life and that of modern Hackney, while the other is a twee film about dating, posturing as a revelatory social experiment.
Samuel–613
Billy Lumby’s Samuel-613 follows a young Hasidic Jew struggling with the discipline his religion demands. The film opens with Shmilu, played with superb awkward intensity by Theo Barklem-Biggs, driving through Hackney, pulling on a cigarette and turning to leer at a woman walking down the street.
He arrives home with a bag of calf jelly for his granddad and is accosted by his father, who accuses him of purchasing pornography from the newsagents and behaving “like a non-Jew”. Furious, Shmilu stamps upstairs to his room, where he stashes the mag under his mattress and browses the web for potential love interests. The temptations of contemporary London, it seems, are everywhere and they pose a threat to his family’s strict orthodoxy.
Following a fierce dinner-table row – a deft display of elegant attention to detail that might be the film’s most impressive scene – Shmilu exiles himself. He’s quickly immersed in a world far removed from the one he’s fled; his confusion and pressing desires collide and the narrative spirals towards a steep and surreal learning curve. It’s a thoughtful take on a fascinating culture that will be a mystery to many viewers.
Just as impressive as the stark subject matter is the style of the film. The hand-held camerawork is sharp, flicking between crisp digital and grainy analogue shots, and the sounds are gorgeous: the ritual washing of hands, the clink and clang of religious paraphernalia, and the thick, soothing Hebrew chants. The choice of music clearly marks the blunt juxtaposition between Shmilu’s old life and his new one.
To achieve his desired level of authenticity, Lumby conducted meticulous research, which began online and advanced to meetings with ostracised members of the Jewish community. He even went undercover to synagogues and, as controversial as that might sound, it has paid dividends; the film is a seething success.
Samuel-613 is at Curzon Soho/ BFI Southbank on 12/16 October at 20.45/12.45
Offline Dating, on the other hand, is less impressive. The so-called Youtube sensation is directed by Samuel Abrahams, who encouraged his friend, actor Tom Greaves, to approach women on the streets of Hackney and ask them out, as a kind of antidote to digital dating. A half-pseudo-documentary, it poses as a clever and insightful critique of modern relationships, when it’s more a damning representation of men, promoting a dense and bullish approach to romance.
For about three-and-a-half minutes, we watch Greaves walk up to prospective partners, behave idiotically and get rejected. His demanding of women’s attention in this way is problematic and makes for uncomfortable viewing. As he begins to achieve a meagre, yet mystifying, degree of success – two girls agree to sort-of go out with him, and he receives encouragement from others – the film feels more and more staged, and by the end it bears no relation to reality whatsoever.
Polished to within an inch of its life, Offline Dating looks like a cross between an Aldi and a Nikon advert. The score that runs throughout resembles something by Sigur Ros and couldn’t be more out of place. While there are a few passably funny moments, it’s essentially an irritating, ineffective film that embodies a lot of what is redundant in arty ‘hipster’ culture today.
When the piece finishes and the credits appear, we hear Greaves’s date, who he’s just kissed, ask him: “Are you embarrassed?” He should be.
Offline Dating is at Vue Cinema Islington/ BFI Southbank on 15/17 October, 18.30/20.45
Good value local film festivals … Photograph: Let’s All be Free festival
The BFI London Film Festival is not the only show in town this month, as two locally based film festivals battle it out for a share of the limelight.
London Fields Free Film Festival
London Fields Free Film Festival returns for its second year with shorts, documentaries and features showing in venues across London Fields (23 October – 1 November).
The programme is centred around themes such as community, creativity, sexuality and mental illness, and with each event tailored to the venue – drag documentary Dressed as a Girl, for example, will be showing at London College of Fashion.
The ten-day festival closes over Halloween weekend, when The Bechdel Test Festival will host the intriguingly entitled Horror Hareem at Hackney Picturehouse, a weekend of horror films with women in lead roles.
Let’s All be Free
Another festival this month claims to “explore and celebrate what it means to be free”.
Let’s All Be Free Festival is at Motel Studio (16–18 October) and will include a selection of shorts, documentaries and ‘expression films’ from around the globe.
Highlights include the poetry film Borders by Elizabeth Mizon, about invasive virginity examinations given to migrating women from the Indian subcontinent in the 1970s.
There will also be spoken word artists, a panel discussion about the refugee crisis, and a Masterclass with Oscar winner Randolph Benson.
Bovine inspiration: Farmer Stephen Hook of Hook & Son with ‘queen of the herd’, Ida. Photograph: Emli Bendixen
The Moo Man has many qualities one might not expect from a film about milk.
The documentary, which is being screened this month at Growing Communities’ Moo-vie Night, has a dreamlike quality. It is intimate, funny and quite captivating.
Sussex farmer Stephen Hook, who has a stall at Stoke Newington’s farmers’ market selling ‘raw’ (non-pasturised) milk, tenderly strokes his happy-seeming cows and addresses them by name. Ida is the “queen of the herd”, he says.
But this picture of the dairy industry is increasingly rare. Stephen is solemn as he laments: “Family farms are being lost… that’s what makes me angry, it really does.”
In an economic climate of plummeting prices and rising production costs, more than half of Britain’s dairy farmers have gone out of business since 2002, with 9,724 remaining as of this August – a fall of 0.5 per cent from July. Indeed, British dairy farmers have recently protested in various supermarkets after major milk producers announced more price cuts.
These issues can seem remote for city-dwellers, who are inevitably alienated from the production of much of their food. According to charity Wide Horizons, over 35 per cent of UK children have never visited the countryside, and LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) found in a survey of 2000 British young adults that 40 per cent did not connect milk to an image of a cow.
For urbanites then, The Moo Man may shed light on the reality of life on a small dairy farm, as it documents the farmers’ determined efforts to secure the cows’ welfare and produce an ‘ethical’ product. Going thoroughly against the grain, Hook attempts to save his family farm by rejecting cost-cutting dairies and supermarkets, and instead fostering a familial atmosphere with his team and herd.
The Moo Man will be screened by Growing Communities, the Hackney social enterprise that aims to bring people closer to food sources, as part of their Urban Food Fortnight and Organic September. Viewers will be offered milkshakes and cocktails made with cream and milk from the farm, and there’ll be a Q&A session with Stephen Hook afterwards.
“It’s vital to pay fair prices to support these small family farmers, who are the basis of a more sustainable food system and have really high animal welfare standards,” said Growing Communities market manager Kerry Rankine. “This film shows just what it takes to keep a small farm going.”
Feminist classic: The Company of Strangers. Photograph: NFB Canada
This year’s London Feminist Film Festival (LFFF) opens today, showcasing films on a wide range of subjects and issues by women directors from across the world.
Fifteen films in total will be screened throughout the four-day festival, which is taking place at Dalston’s Rio Cinema as well as the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn.
Some of the themes covered include women in UK hip hop, children’s views on gender, sexual harassment in public space and Jewish feminism.
This Saturday there will be a screening of six short films and, on its final day, the festival will hold a ‘feminist classics session’. Each session will be followed by a panel discussion.
The festival begins this evening at the Rio with The Lady of Percussion, a film about a female drummer trying to make it in the male-dominated Cuban music industry. This is followed by Through the Lens of Hip Hop: UK Women. After the screening rapper Pariz-1, who features in the film, is set to perform.
Tomorrow (21 August) will see the UK premiere of She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry by Mary Dore, a history of the “outrageous … brilliant women who founded the modern women’s movement from 1966 to 1971”, while Saturday’s screenings include the European premiere of It Happened Here.
This documentary follows the stark and disturbing prevalence of sexual assault on US university campuses. The film will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Jessica Horn, a women’s rights consultant and a founding member of the African Feminist Forum. All profits from this screening go to Rape Crisis England and Wales.
The final day of the LFFF kicks off with a matinee screening of But They Can’t Break Stones by Elena Dirstaru, which offers an insight into women’s rights in Nepal, and is preceded by a short by Maryam Tafakory about FGM.
At 4pm the festival will dig up a feminist classic: Cynthia Scott’s 1990 film The Company of Strangers. The film blends fiction, documentary and improvisation to track the (mis)adventures and of a bus-full of elderly women, stranded in the Canadian countryside. The film won Best Canadian Film at that year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.
The festival finale that evening is another UK premiere, Esther Broner: A Weave of Women by Lilly Rivlin, which documents the evolution of Jewish feminism through a portrait of Esther Broner, founder of the first Feminist Passover Seder service in New York in the 1970s.
The LFFF’s director and founder Anna Read said of the festival:“There is still so much discrimination and oppression of women everywhere in the world – we screen films showing women fighting back and navigating a space for themselves and other women in this sexist world.
“We aim to show films which deal with the important issues of the day and which can inspire others to get involved in feminist activism in one way or another. So often we see a narrow, stereotypical misogynist view of women in films – LFFF prides itself on showing films with positive role models for women and girls. So, in essence, we’re trying to create a space for feminism and women filmmakers and to perhaps change the world just a tiny bit.”
The London Feminist Film Festival runs until 23 August at the Rio Cinema, Dalston and the Tricycle Cinema, Kilburn.
Charlotte Ginsborg’s Melior Street takes elements of documentary, performance and auteurship and stirs them together to produce an intriguing study of a place in perpetual flux.
The film was recently screened at Hackney Picturehouse, and was followed by a talk with the director and Emeritus Professor Ken Worpole, an expert in East London architecture and sociology.
Gaping like a canyon on the south side of London Bridge, the eponymous road – which has already changed significantly since the film’s original, pre-Shard release in 2011 – is composed of a ragtag mix of architecture.
Amongst towering glass facades, there’s a Catholic church, a homeless centre, a community garden, a banking college and an immigration office. From these locations, and others, Ginsborg pulls together a cast of real people and delivers a montage of varying experience and diverse psychologies.
Opening to a sequence of everyday urban images and a frantic strings accompaniment, the piece instantly calls to mind Dziga Vertov’s classic Man with a Movie Camera. Composer Gabriel Prokofiev, who heads a Hackney-based contemporary classical music label, has contributed a mesmerising score that perfectly complements Ginsborg’s artistry.
From then on, there’s a lot more to admire in the work. The photography is exquisite and the director’s creative approach to portraying a deeply fragmented – and fragmenting – social space is very impressive. As well exploring her chosen landscape using traditional documentary methods, she incorporates a series of odd, well-executed dramatic constructions and a bizarre use of song.
Taking her contributors’ words, Ginsborg pieces together tracks that are then performed by the characters; the film becomes at once a musical, a drama, a documentary and a topographical study. Such self-reflexive formal flourishes effectively – and provocatively – call into question the usefulness of drawing distinct lines between fiction and the real.
Beyond stylistic technique, the film is very much about discussion and sharing stories, in the tradition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – the procession in which, coincidentally, sets off from Southwark. The talk in the piece focuses a lot on community, belonging and identity.
While Ginsborg’s one-on-one interviews are always interesting and sometimes surprising, the conversations she facilitates between her characters can feel laboured, even cumbersome. Her concern with the authoring role of the director becomes, at times, a touch too pronounced and the dialogue suffers as a result.
But this small criticism mustn’t take away from the film’s considerable merit. Something of Melior Street feels like lifting the red rock of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and peering into the shadows beneath. It’s a bold reflection of chaos, creativity and the transience of city life, and it’s well worth a watch for anyone interested in the psychogeography of London.
Camden, not Hackney, is the place with which the singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 of alcohol poisoning, will always be associated.
But for Hackney-born director Asif Kapadia, whose acclaimed documentary Amy tells the story of the singer’s precarious life and untimely death, Winehouse could have been “a girl from down the road”.
Unlike other films directed by Kapadia, such as the award-winning documentary Senna, Amy is a London film. And like many fellow Londoners, Kapadia was moved by the singer’s life.
“Something happened with Amy Winehouse,” says Kapadia, explaining why he decided to make the film. “I wanted to know how that happened in front of our eyes. How can someone die like that in this day and age?
“For me, she was like a girl from down the road. I grew up in the same part of the world. She could have been someone I knew, someone I was friends with or might have gone to school with. I thought we should investigate.”
Kapadia was born in 1972, the youngest of five children. He went to Homerton House school (now the site of City Academy) and began his film career as a runner on student films.
After undertaking an HND at Newport Film School, Kapadia studied film-making at the University of Westminster before completing a Masters in film and TV direction at the Royal College of Art.
Amy has already broken box office records, and looks set to challenge Senna, Kapadia’s documentary about Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, as the highest grossing British documentary of all time.
Like Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna was an icon who died in tragic circumstances. But researching the story and carrying out interviews for Senna proved a more straightforward process.
“With Senna there were a lot of books and a lot of people knew the story. With Amy it became apparent that no one knew the story, or that people were not willing to tell it.”
Many of Winehouse’s closest friends apparently took a ‘vow of silence’ after her funeral, so to complete the 100 plus interviews that make up the film’s narrative, the production team needed to win over their trust, a process that took almost a year.
“It was all quite recent and painful for a lot of people and there was a lot of guilt and a lot of baggage,” adds producer James Gay-Rees.
“The whole experience took an awful lot out of all these people, understandably.
It is hard to imagine what it must be like to see your closest childhood or teenage friend going through the perils of celebrity and mega-fame, knowing that there were underlying issues that would come to the fore.”
Kapadia made the songs and lyrics of Amy Winehouse central to the film. “Once you understand her life and you read the lyrics, they run much deeper than you might have thought,” he says.
“I thought all we have to do is unravel what these lyrics are about. That for me became the big revelation. This is a film about Amy and her writing.”
There’s a theory that your first work of art will always be an intensely personal expression. But does that mean it must be autobiographical?
For filmmaker Harry Macqueen, there’s clear water between the two. His recent feature debut, Hinterland, was acclaimed by indie cinema aficionados and critics alike, and on the surface is a film hand-woven with real-life experience. Or maybe not.
“The film is very personal, but not autobiographical at all really,” Macqueen reflects. “The literal journey the characters take is one I’ve done all my life but that’s kind of where the parallels stop.”
Nonetheless, Hinterland is a film that will speak directly to many a misfit lost in the late-twenties wasteland. Charting a road trip taken by level-headed, would-be novelist Harvey (Macqueen) and starry-eyed musician Lola (Lori Campbell), it’s a bittersweet love letter to friendship, childhood and unspoken truths.
“Although the film has a kind of timeless quality to it in the way it’s shot, for me it’s definitely about being in your twenties in contemporary Britain – London to be more specific.”
You could also be forgiven for viewing Hinterland as an auteur-piece, a film meticulously managed and perfected by its creator. After all, Macqueen not only wrote and directed, but also produced and joint-starred. Once again, however, there’s a distinction to be made; this jack-of-all-trades approach was born of shoestring necessity rather than perfectionism (or megalomania).
“It all comes down to budget really,” he explains. “Initially I’d written myself a little cameo in the film and was happy just to see if I could write and direct, but in the end, realising there was no money left (nor space for one more person in the car), I had no choice but to take a lead role.
“Similarly we couldn’t afford a producer, and since I’d written it and knew the locations pretty well it seemed like something I could also do.”
It’s a scenario that will be familiar to most first-time directors with big ideas and scant resources. Making Hinterland was clearly a labour of love for everyone in the six-person team behind it. Indeed, this was the main thrust of Macqueen’s introduction to a recent screening at Hackney Picturehouse, one of 12 Picturehouse cinemas that championed the film around the UK.
“One of the key things that helped us finish the film was that we all fell in love with it,” he told the audience. “We fell in love with the characters and the story.”
Macqueen’s bread and butter comes from acting, with appearances in the likes of Eastenders and feelgood Hollywood romp Me And Orson Welles. As such, the evolution towards producing and directing a feature film wasn’t painless:
“The entire process was a huge challenge for all involved, not just me. Considering pretty well none of us had made a feature before it’s a massive achievement.”
Shot on location along a raggedly beautiful stretch of Cornish coast, the production was very much a DIY, communal effort.
“We had fun and laughed a lot and it was exhilarating to make a film in that way – everyone living under one roof looking after each another.
“The actual shoot was pretty intense, simply because we didn’t have that much time to get it all done.”
Hinterland is also a memorial, as testified by the hand-drawn dedication at the movie’s close. Inheritance money left by a close family member financed the production to the tune of £10,000 – a budget that was soon on the verge of exhaustion.
Happily, these restrictions may well have been an unlikely blessing. The handcrafted style of the film is complemented by its part-improvised dialogue, all of which hangs together with delicate, understated charm. It’s a movie that refuses to spoonfeed its audience, as expressed by the intrigue surrounding Harvey and Lola’s own friendship.
“The ‘truth’ in almost every situation doesn’t exist in the words we speak but in the spaces in between them, what we don’t say,” says Macqueen.
“I think it follows that if that’s what you are striving to focus on, to capture a situation or a performance ‘honestly’, it’s paramount to try and explore that.
“I wanted to find my own voice, and the most important thing at all times was to be truthful to the characters in whatever way seemed appropriate.”
With a Raindance nomination, inclusion in several major film festivals and backing from Picturehouse and Curzon cinemas, Hinterland certainly isn’t a bad start for a filmmaker clearing his throat.
For Harry Macqueen, it’s been a rollercoaster introduction to the world of filmmaking – but one that was clear-eyed from the very start.
Being a drag queen is about saying “fuck you” to everyone else, declares DJ John Sizzle to the camera at the start of Dressed as a Girl, a new documentary about East London’s alternative drag scene.
The film, set to be one of the highlights of this month’s East End Film Festival, charts six years in the lives of a group of people who share a love of partying, dressing up and a determination to express themselves however they want.
“Coming of age stories are usually people in their teens and early 20s but this is about people in their-mid 30s and turning 40 and growing up finally,” says the scene’s ‘ringmaster’, Jonny Woo.
Woo gained a cult following in East London after he founded Gay Bingo in 2003, a notorious night out which used bingo as a pretext for all manner of outrageous goings-on.
Complete with blonde wig and fake eyelashes, Woo presents each character in turn, building up the mythology of the group with a languid delivery that contrasts to the chaos on screen.
We meet Amber, a transvestite model who wants to transition into a woman. Holestar is a self-proclaimed ‘tranny with a fanny’, the only biological female of the group. Scottee is an ambitious show off with a troubled past, while Pia claims to have predicted the end of the world. And then there’s John Sizzle who, as he approaches the age of 45, wonders if drag is still for him.
The film begins with early footage of Gay Bingo, when the scene was in its infancy. Using the innocent concept of bingo as an excuse for madcap debauchery (you have to see it to believe it), it shows how ready excess and exhibitionism was the group’s stock-in-trade.
Jonny Woo as Dressed as a Girl’s narrator
The film then leaps ahead to Glastonbury in 2009, a gig at the Royal Opera House and Lovebox.
“The idea initially was for it to be a year in the life of all these East London alternative performers as a time capsule-type thing,” says Holestar, who came up with the idea to make a film alongside its director, Colin Rothbart.
“But because of funding we decided to make it a longer project, which was quite beneficial in the long term because you see how everyone changes as people.
“It’s a celebration of that alternative, new artistic wave of creativity that was taking over at the time, especially in Hackney. I like to think it’s an East London celebration.”
Colin Rothbart moved to East London in 2008 and makes television programmes for the likes of MTV by day. He wasn’t part of the gay scene when he agreed to direct Dressed as a Girl, he says, and as an unknown quantity he wasn’t trusted from the outset.
“Because I had a TV background I think some of them thought oh he’s going stitch us up, so there was always that suspicion and it took a long time to get the core characters on board.”
But once signed up, the core characters had their own ideas about the filming. Some wanted their performances to be the film’s focus but that, says Rothbart, would have made it a “home video for the scene”.
“They didn’t really want me to meet their family or ask some probing questions about their past or anything like that, so that took a long time. I think that’s why it benefitted from having six years to film.”
Looking past the wigs and false eyelashes to darker and more serious issues such as suicide, addiction and mental illness gives the film a far broader appeal that will hopefully ensure it gets an audience outside East London.
“We’re all eventually talking about quite low moments in our lives, or very personal things,” says Woo.
“I think this idea, that everything’s great, everything’s fun, but actually we’re all dealing with some quite serious shit… it kind of destroys the illusion a little bit.”
Each of the characters is a star in their own right, and a few of them could carry a film on their own. Amber’s story, from holding a fundraiser in Dalston to raise money for a boob job, to opening up her own shop and a difficult reunion with her family, is at turns funny, moving and inspiring.
“She really wanted her story to be a beacon for people who are growing up, and being transgender in countries where it wasn’t accepted, so she let us into every aspect of her life,” says Rothbart.
For Woo, the excesses of the drag scene almost proved fatal. The film shows him coming back from the brink and redefining his life.
“It is about the glamour and hedonism, but it’s also about the effects of it,” says Rothbart. “The scene is great fun but it can kill you if you’re not careful. And if you’re being offered unlimited drink and drugs some people take it a little too far sometimes.”
Jonny Woo, John Sizzle and co at Hackney Empire
The six-year filming period allows you to see each character, in all their fabulousness and all their flaws. Holestar, who was this year named Best Drag Act at the London Cabaret Awards, talks freely about her struggles with depression.
“My aim for the film was for anyone who thinks they’re different to be able to watch this and think it’s ok, you can be whatever the hell you want to be.”
Two of the characters, Jonny Woo and John Sizzle, as well as the director Rothbart, now own a pub called The Glory on Kingsland Road, while Scottee has become a Radio 4 broadcaster as well as associate artist at the Roundhouse. So has the scene grown up and disbanded?
“Not so much actually,” Jonny Woo insists. “The drag scene in East London is as vibrant as it was back then and is bigger, and has far more people doing drag.
“People moan and say there’s nothing’s going on and things are closing down, but the East London drag scene is absolutely buzzing. That scene was of its time, but the party isn’t over.”
DRESSED AS A GIRL will be released by Peccadillo Pictures, where it is playing throughout the UK as part of the POUT Fest Tour followed by the DVD late 2015.
